Awards for New Mersenne Primes
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is offering a $100,000 award to the first person or group to discover a ten million digit prime number. If you find such a prime with the software provided, GIMPS will claim the award and distribute the award according to the following rules.
No money will be awarded unless and until GIMPS discovers a 10,000,000 digit prime, it is independently verified, and EFF validates our claim according to their rules. Verification is likely to take over a year and publication in a suitable academic refereed journal as required by EFF rules will likely take another six months.
For tax reasons, no money will be awarded until GIMPS is incorporated as a non-profit organization. You are responsible for all applicable taxes.
Up to $20,000 total will be awarded to the discoverers of new Mersenne primes found after September 1, 1999 and prior to the discovery of the 10,000,000 digit prime. Each new Mersenne prime will receive a maximum of $5,000.
Up to $10,000 total will be awarded to the discoverers of mathematical or algorithmic breakthroughs in searching for Mersenne primes. To qualify for the entire award the breakthrough must be simple enough to be implemented in prime95 and double current throughput. George Woltman will be the sole determiner of whether a suggested breakthrough will be implemented, how it affects throughput, and the dollar amount to be awarded. Examples of what does not qualify: optimizations of the present code, new CPU architectures, suggesting a parallelized FFT implementation, etc. Examples of what might qualify: a faster way to find factors, a way to eliminate or speed up double-checking, a new way to use smaller FFT sizes, etc.
Up to $20,000 will be awarded to GIMPS, Inc. to cover expenses or fund future awards.
$25,000 will be awarded to the charity of George Woltman's choice for organizing GIMPS and providing the software.
The remainder goes to the discoverer of the 10,000,000 digit prime.
If a group or team wishes to make a claim of one of the above awards, they must appoint a single individual to make the claim and disperse the award.
These rules may be changed at any time prior to the discovery of a 10,000,000 digit prime.
The decisions of the GIMPS board of directors in applying the rules above and granting awards is final. Prior to GIMPS' incorporation the decision of George Woltman is final.
If you were to find a 10,000,000 digit prime today the above rules imply that $25,000 would go to charity, $20,000 would go to GIMPS primarily to fund future awards, and $55,000 would go to you.
Now the bad news. Testing a single 10,000,000 digit number takes a full year on a 500 MHz Pentium III computer. Your chance of success is roughly 1 in 250,000. Someone may find a 10,000,000 digit prime before GIMPS does.
Last updated: August 30, 1999